Guys here is a graph of Comm, Agri, and Tax income for VIRALS. (I spent my time on this instead of doing my Federal taxes, wife not happy lol)
Graph of Normalized Income Varying with Food Price
http://img24.imageshack.us/img24/5497/incomegraphx.jpg
It is normalized to commercial income which is line that goes horizontally across at 1 on the Y axis (hard to see unless make graph big). The x axis is what food sells at/costs 1-20 and the Y axis is the relative income based on the food price. Some interesting observations from the graph are:
At Food Cost of 1 Tax income is 5 times more than Commercial! (See on graph Tax line is up at 5 when food is 1 and commercial straight line across always about equal to 1)
At Food Cost > 17 Tax starts to lose money and Agriculture makes 4 times more than commerical!
Agriculture always makes more than Commercial if Food is above 4.
Tax is better than Agriculture if food is 9 or less
Agriculture is better than Tax if food is 10 or more.
Comm starts to be better than Tax if food is above 14 (but Agri beats commercial here by more than 3 times!)
Stephen balanced these incomes for viral very well as the food price changes so it is hard to pick which income type to be for your empire.
The safe option of commercial income does leave quite a bit of income on the table.
I believe this to be accurate checking with my 2 viral empires but I had to make many assumptions, still it should be within like 10 percent of the real thing I would think. It is independant of research level or land. I did even account for things like when you are tax you eat more food than when agri or comm and when you are comm or agri you have to spend a small percent of land on housing to get labor so not 100% of land is ever used for com and agri. It is normalized to comm income so it won`t tell you what your income will be just what research type is better given a food price. Also goods were left out of calc.
C
CerticomOP